peter lothberg's mother slashdotted

Thu Jul 12 20:34:46 UTC 2007

On Thu, 12 Jul 2007, Stephen Wilcox wrote:

> They cite this as worlds fastest home broadband but didnt Peter install
> an OC-768 to his basement a few years ago when he was testing some stuff
> for Sprint?

This story has spread a lot, I'm actually quite surprised, but Peter is
good at PR.

The point he tried to make was that fiber can carry high speed
communications as opposed to other people who seem to think radio is the
future. The equipment used (the CRS-1 OC768 DWDMPOS linecard) has been
shipping for over a year so that's not new. Sprint did test with beta
versions of this LC in 2004:

<http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=53816>

What I like about it is that it uses single 50GHz wave that can traverse
existing DWDM systems designed for 10G waves but that can now carry 40G.

So basically there is little new with this test, but the amount of
publicity it has received I interpret that the technology is fairly
unknown even to professionals in the business, so it might have been a
good thing after all, as it made more people aware of what's possible.

I sat at the Stockholm end when he brought up the wave and it was
surprisingly easy to get it all to work, if this was real production
traffic I would have liked to do more verification and testing, but it
shows that some IP people can bring up new waves in a DWDM system using
routers as end nodes, one doesn't need a huge transmission staff to do it,
neither does one have to have SR-DWDM transponders.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se